An anecdote from a trip to Paris, I walked into a store to look for a gift for someone back home. After making the greeting in French, I started to explain what I was looking for. The woman stopped me. With a dramatic eye roll she said, "Speak English, pleeeease."

An anecdote from a trip to Quebec city. My wife and I walked up to a hostess to inquire about getting a table for dinner. We greeted her in French. As soon as we started to ask about a table, she stopped us and said, "No no no no. This will be in English."

It's only two anecdotes. I may have simply run into rude people. But, they made me not care to ever speak French.

My daughter is taking Spanish in school right now. I'm learning a little as well. We have a large population of people around us from different Spanish speaking countries. They seem to be very tolerant of mistakes. I'm very much looking forward to learning more of their language.

> I may have simply run into rude people.

Why did you think those people were rude, instead of, say, trying to be helpful?

French is difficult to understand when spoken badly, even for natives (maybe esp. for natives). We don't understand what people are trying to say -- really. We don't try to be condescending: we truly do. not. understand. I get that foreigners / tourists may not believe it, but it is true.

The reason why Parisians are so rude in this context, as I've heard from several French natives, is that time is money. Most interactions with tourists in Paris are transactional. If a shopkeeper or restaurant server can spend two minutes with one customer in not-perfect French, or 30 seconds in not-perfect English, and there is no recreational value for the Parisian to the slower choice, then the Parisian will renegotiate the discussion's language to the faster choice.

You could call that helpful if you're optimizing for fastest transaction. For tourists who might have spent years in school learning the French language, and many recent weeks on Duolingo refreshing before the trip, and who are optimizing for a richer local experience, it's thoughtless and rude. Both viewpoints are rational.

It's not what they said that was rude. It's the way they said it.

Also I doubt that French is objectively harder to understand when spoken poorly than most languages. Especially when you consider tonal languages like Vietnamese and Mandarin.

Harder, I don't know. Hard, yes.

Difficulty in understanding non native speakers is largely subjective. It depends heavily on the perception of the listener.

Basically if the listener believes that it is difficult, it will be. Additionally, the harder the listener tries to engage with and understand the non-native speaker, the easier it becomes.

French could be unique among languages, but my strong suspicion is that if what you describe is true for most French speakers, it's mostly due to a widespread cultural perception that non-native French speakers are hard to understand rather than objective difficulty.

There is a professor at Georgia State University who's primary research focus is on this topic if you're interested in reading more.

http://www2.gsu.edu/~eslsal/cv.htm

> There is a professor at Georgia State University who's primary research focus is on this topic if you're interested in reading more. http://www2.gsu.edu/~eslsal/cv.htm

Interesting and intriguing! Thanks!

Eye-rolling and interrupting are always rude.

Untrue: the last time I was in Portugal, I had a couple of marvelous conversations in my lousy French with older Portuguese shopkeeps (whose French was probably similarly lousy -it is more common among older people to speak French than English, as many of their generation emigrated to France for work). I'm pretty sure the French dislike how accented, goofy foreigners sound when mispronouncing their language. I always found it a relief when they switched to much better English, as French is pretty hard.

I now have some lousy Portuguese, so we'll see if the Portuguese people are more gregarious with their language or if they ask me to fall back to French.

As a French living in France, here is my take on it.

Your two anecdotes do seem rude, however I would personally have asked the same thing, but in a different way, like "We could continue in English if you want" with probably a slight incentive in my tone to actually switch to English (sorry if I also appear a bit rude). Or Maybe I will just reply to your every question in English.

A native English speaker is blessed, English has become the de facto lingua franca of the World which means learning a foreign language generally is a luxury. For everybody else, it's more of a necessity, and you tend to be exposed to English in your everyday life, at least to some degree (films, tv shows, technical documentation, meetings if you work within an international team), so chances are the person you are talking to is actually more fluent in English that you are in French (and it's also valid for any other language).

It also means it's somewhat harder to actually learn a foreign language as a native English. As a personal experience, one of my colleagues is American, but wants to settle in France, so he is trying to learn French, and sometimes, we actually start speaking in French, but after one or two minutes, we switch to English. I just see my colleague struggling and I know the conversation would be easier in English. I feel a little guilty about it.

Lastly, but a bit out of topic, there might be some small cultural differences. Just to illustrate, In an American restaurant, the waiter will ask you if everything is ok at least once or twice during the course of the meal, in a French restaurant, he will take your order and leave you alone until you finish eating your dish (and then ask you if you want a desert, a coffee or the bill).

I would have appreciated your approach. When I studied French we focused on reading and writing, not speaking. So, I was admittedly not a strong French speaker. I can understand their frustration. Had I been given the choice I might have chosen English.

You've been to American restaurants and only been interrupted once or twice by waiters? You were quite blessed then. Ordinarily, we expect conversations to be interrupted 5-6 times per meal. (I'm only slightly exaggerating.) Here's a true story illustrating how ridiculous it gets. I proposed to my wife in our favorite restaurant. I chose purposefully an early dinner time so we would have the restaurant to ourselves. As I began to kneel and pull the engagement ring out of my pocket, a busboy stepped between my wife and I to refill our water glasses. It was a bit awkward for about 20 seconds or so.

> in a French restaurant, he will take your order and leave you alone until you finish eating

Moving to France!

> An anecdote from a trip to Quebec city. My wife and I walked up to a hostess to inquire about getting a table for dinner. We greeted her in French. As soon as we started to ask about a table, she stopped us and said, "No no no no. This will be in English."

Native Québecois here. That's most definitely very odd.

The typical scenario is someone not fluent in French attempts to speak it, and the other person switches to English as a courtesy, not as a slight against you; many people forget or don't know that most Québecois in major cities are bilingual.

Simply mentioning that you would like to continue in French so that you can practice will elicit gratitude and wide smiles - we really, really, really like it when people speak French, no matter the quality, and most will happily help you learn a few extra words or expressions.

I had a similar experience in Paris. "No, no, no, monsieur; we make this easy for everyone and do it in English." Depending on your mood and charitable inclinations, that's either supremely helpful or amazingly condescending.

It's gonna be interesting for me. I'm about to move to Montreal (flight is in 2 days). I want to learn French very well to idle-mine immigration points. I'm gonna make mistakes. That's just how it is. The surest path to success is failure.

It's sometimes difficult in Montreal due to how easy it is to get around in English; people will by default switch to English to help you out, and almost everyone is bilingual to some degree.

Just stick to your guns of speaking in French and let people know you want to practice, and you'll do great!

And congratulations on the move! It's a wonderful city. So wonderful that I'm moving back there in a month after being in the Toronto region for almost 10 years.

We enjoyed Quebec and Montreal. The singular rude experience didn't diminish it. We're eager to introduce our daughter to both cities now that she's old enough to appreciate them.

Sure, I am passionate about Russian grammar too, and I used to correct mistakes of native Russians writing in Russian (I stopped doing that when I learned that dyslexia is quite real and common, and I now feel sorry for that).

However, any foreigner trying to speak Russian, no matter how broken or incorrect, will meet nothing but praise and encouragement from other Russians.

Except the lady who sells subway tickets in Moscow. That lady is quite grumpy.

(Everyone else was kind.)

I took immersive classes, speaking 6 hours / day, 90 minutes spent on pronunciation drills. The only downside is my accent got better faster than my vocab, confusing lots of people with whom I interacted.

That's too bad, but I have a hopeful story for you.

I have a few years of high school and college French fortified by a couple months spent living in Lyon with a French family. Other than an hour between CDG and the TGV station, I'd never been to Paris until 2016, which was long after my French studies.

That 2016 trip was disappointing. I'd mentally rehearse the restaurant order while looking at the menu, or check Google Translate for the exact words describing the thing I needed from the store, and I had the same experience as you: a strong feeling I was exceedingly boring to the other person, and please let's switch to the easy path to get this drudgery over with. Speaking French was a big attraction to why I was looking forward to going to France. It was a letdown.

But three years later, in 2019, I found myself back in Paris, and this time I had several successful non-phatic discussions with natives that I'd characterize as enjoyable in any language. What changed?

Strangely enough, the change was learning Mandarin, which I started doing last year. Aside from my being an adult, Mandarin is hard for anyone to learn as a second language, so I never expected to reach conversational fluency in it. And my resulting attitude every time I'm talking to a native Mandarin speaker is "well, fuck it, I'm never going to be good at this, but I have to start somewhere, so let's just try to assemble what I'm thinking out of the 500 words I know, and see what happens." It's a totally different attitude from my well-studied, well-schooled, well-read, but not well-practiced French brain. And while I still concede I'll never be fluent in Mandarin, I'm saying an awful lot more to Mandarin speakers than I would have a single year into my French studies.

This lack of inhibition led into a better experience in France. I didn't bother trying to construct full, stammering sentences in restaurants. I just said the numbers and nouns and gave one-word answers to whatever the server asked -- insisting on switching to English would have actually prolonged our time together. But in circumstances where conversation would have helped pass the time -- cab ride where the driver looks like he's wondering something about us, or standing in line where all of us were clearly confused by the same situation, etc. -- I just went for it, with the same fuck-it attitude, and it worked out. We had our short, meaningful, optional conversations that scratched the "I spoke real French in real France" itch.

In short, yes, unfortunately, the problem really is you (and me). But it's fixable. Stop thinking "I'm about to speak French." Just let it happen.

> It's only two anecdotes. I may have simply run into rude people. But, they made me not care to ever speak French.

Oddly, my experience has been the opposite. Most of the places I have gone to in Paris spoke very little to no English but were trying to be very helpful anyway and I HAD to use my broken French.

However, I could tell that we didn't really hit the "standard" tourist shops (stayed just off École Militaire).

I will say that most English speakers tend to be VERY tolerant of mistakes. I think it's a combination of:

1) There is no single "native" English.

Think about how different people from different socioeconomic classes in the US, Canada, UK, India, etc. sound. And they are all native English speakers!

2) English is really agglomerative and absorbs neologisms readily.

Think about how quickly typhoon and tycoon entered the language, for example. Can you picture that kind of evolution for any other language?

In this way Belgium is much better in my experience. Especially in Brussels people are really tolerant of poor French (presumably due to the two language situation).

> An anecdote from a trip to Quebec city. My wife and I walked up to a hostess to inquire about getting a table for dinner. We greeted her in French. As soon as we started to ask about a table, she stopped us and said, "No no no no. This will be in English."

I was under the impression (having never been to Quebec) that she was in fact breaking the law by doing this.

As someone who lives in Quebec, I assure you that the government does not legislate what languages people can speak. They're picky about signs and menus and whatever, but you can't tell people what language to speak. There was a motion in the legislature to urge people not use "Bonjour-Hi" as a greeting, but that's not binding, and cannot be.

To my knowledge that wouldn't be breaking the law. The law is that service has to be AVAILABLE in French.

From the Charter of the French language: "Consumers of goods and services have a right to be informed and served in French." http://www.legisquebec.gouv.qc.ca/en/showdoc/cs/C-11#se:5

Yes, and these consumers who requested service in French were told, "no, this will be in English"

It's a little shocking that you're under this impression. The Charter of the French Language in Quebec ensures the right of consumers to be informed and served in French. It does not prevent people from serving you in English or any other language for that matter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_of_the_French_Language

That's exactly why I thought it was illegal for people requesting service in French to be told, "no, this will be in English"

If they insisted to be served in French then they would have to be served in French, but what little of the situation has been detailed this does not seem to be the case.

I think it's ambiguous. At what point is there a refusal, and what degree of insistence is required? Someone initiates a request for service in French, the response is "no, no, no this will be in English". Has that person refused to conduct the transaction in French?

I suppose the person requesting service could be more forceful about insisting on being served in French, but does someone have to go through a second round of insisting/refusing before service has been denied? And what words count as insisting (id that is required), what words count as refusal? "No, no, no, this will be in English" seems very close to a refusal to me.

I wouldn't be surprised if this has been formally litigated in Canada, it'd be interesting to know.

> If I speak bad French with a French person... may God have mercy upon my soul. Especially if I forgot to say bonjout/bonsoir first (abomination! burn the heretic!)

These are two very different things. In my years of experience, the most likely outcome of speaking imperfect French is just that the French person switches to speaking perfect English.

Not saying hello+good morning is a social sanitation faux pas viewed akin to not washing your hands after using the toilet.

I'm not going to defend the latter, because it's all very formulaic, but I lived in France for years without proficiency and never had a poor encounter because of my unskilled French.

I've only met French speakers who could switch to perfect English in Quebec province.

French speakers from France make mistakes all the time and their pronunciation is very far from perfect. (As long as I can understand them, I don't care.) That being said, someone from France's English is more than likely many times better than my French.

> In my years of experience, the most likely outcome of speaking imperfect French is just that the French person switches to speaking perfect English

If they're from Canada, maybe [1]. If they're from France, a decent chunk of Wallonie (French-speaking Belgium) or Romandie (French-speaking Switzerland), I doubt it. France has one of the lowest rates of English proficiency among the other developed countries in Western Europe and I know that first hand.

[1] And the average French person wouldn't consider what the Quebecois speak as French :p

> The problem with French is that the French are very sensitive to mistakes.

Define sensitive?

When my wife (who is Czech) or my colleague (who is Venezuelan) make French errors, I correct them the same way I correct my children: not because it is annoying me (I don't speak Czech and my Spanish is terrible!) but because I want to help them.

And yes, if someone speaks bad French, I'll switch to English but that's not out of disrespect, it's because it's more efficient/easy, if you prefer that the discussion stays in French to practice your French, just say so..

No, your attitude is fine. I am OK when somebody corrects me. When they switch to English because they think English will be comfortable for both sides, this is also fine.

It is rolling one's eyes and immediate passive aggressive remarks that I hate, and they are quite common...

It might be the passive aggressive attitude itself rather than a reaction to the language. A frequent example is Parisian waiters in bistros. It is an old tradition for the waiter to be slightly cavalier with the clients, and for the clients to respond in kind. But it’s a kind of a parisian joke. Though I get how it would put off foreigners. But many other trades have their ritual (like a souk in Marrocco).

As a French, let me tell you that I find the behaviour of many Parisian waiters rude and unprofessional, perhaps that's because I'm not Parisian though..

To call it a game is being rather hand wavy. It's not a game if the hapless tourist isn't in on it.

> And yes, if someone speaks bad French, I'll switch to English but that's not out of disrespect, it's because it's more efficient/easy, if you prefer that the discussion stays in French to practice your French, just say so..

It might be efficient, but it will definitely hurt the self-esteem of the other person. Been there. I speak 5 languages fluently and tried to learn Italian. Went to Florence and every time I tried to speak Italian, people would answer in English. I know they're doing it because they're used to tourism and it's more efficient - yet at the same time it made me doubt so much about my language learning skills that I probably won't try it again for a while.

I think in part it's due to very few native English speakers being multi-lingual. Rudely correcting someone on their second-language is a faux-pas for most people in the UK. From my experience, people will try to be helpful and constructive with their criticism - because lets be honest, how many native English speakers could say much more than Hello, Please and Thank You in anything but English?

Conversely, I can see why some Europeans might be more passionate about correct grammar and pronunciation. As youth begin to speak in a hybrid of English and their native language, it begins to erodes their cultural identity. It makes sense if they're passionate about their countries heritage, which many French people are, to try and resist the Anglicising of a part of that.

Americans butchered the English language anyway so you couldn't do much worse ;)

You make a fair point. I can understand fear about a loss of cultural identity. But, speaking from a strategic standpoint, if you want to preserve the language, you need to get more people speaking it. Corrections can come later. It's like a child learning a musical instrument. Rare is the child who can tolerate being stopped every few seconds with corrections. But, teach a child to play a song in a rudimentary way on the instrument and you capture their interest. Once interest is captured, you can start teaching proper technique.

And yes, we of the US butchered English. I have no qualm with that statement. We also can't get metric right. At least we drive on the proper side of the road though. ;-)

But how are you meant to fight off bandits with your sword arm if you're travelling on the right hand side of the road?! Utterly irresponsible. /s

LOL! Love it. We could learn a fair bit about humor from the British as well.

It also depends on social circles. If you hang around with a bunch of eton/oxbridge old boys, even as a non native english speaker closing in on my 15th year in London, I struggle to understand many of the expressions. But I don’t when watching the BBC. Also as the article mentions there are many terms that are very infrequent, and even as a native French speaker, I had to look up a few cathedral terms in the dictionary.

But I kind of disagree with your “God have mercy on my soul” statement. French people are extremely proud (and being a French native, rightly so!). There is nothing they appreciate more than the world looking at them. When the international press makes their cover on France, it usually gets reported with screenshots in French media, something I have not seen in any other large country. For the same reason, most French people tend to feel flattered when someone makes an effort to speak their language. Though there are enough ancient and illogical grammatical rules to ensure a non native always gets spotted after only a few sentences.

If you want a challenge to your English, go to Glasgow.

Holy hell do they have a thick accent. I've only encountered an accent that thick in very rural US (think deep South or Appalachia).

I learned my French in West Africa - everyone there is extremely happy and friendly and very willing to tolerate my terrible accent.

It made learning French as fun & enjoyable as learning Spanish in Central & South America.

This is very correct. English's status as an international language does wonders - you can speak in any terrible accent, get all the vowels wrong, invert word orders, ignore plurals and be wrong about every preposition and people will make an effort to understand you.

Now for German, you can speak any of the awful dialects natively and it's fine. But never, never dare Hochdeutsch with with a _foreign_ accent as people will make a point of not understanding you! Because dropping a umlaut suddenly makes an entire sentence impossible to parse!

> Now for German, you can speak any of the awful dialects natively and it's fine. But never, never dare Hochdeutsch with with a _foreign_ accent as people will make a point of not understanding you! Because dropping a umlaut suddenly makes an entire sentence impossible to parse!

Well, for Germany it's not about the language, it's about the fact that making any mistake that gives away that German is not your native language suddenly makes you a stupid immigrant of lower education in the eyes of the most of the natives.

I visited Germany (West Germany at the time) in the Summer of 1988. At the time, I had taken one course in German (Hochdeutsch) at my university. People seemed very friendly and willing to speak German or English. Mistakes were tolerated and they provided assistance when I couldn't remember a word. It was a short trip. I visited four cities. But, people were consistent throughout.

I’m a sample of one, but my experience with French people has been much different. As long as I’ve been open about being a beginner (from Western Canada) who badly wants to practice, I’ve actually been quite pleasantly surprised by how hard French speakers work to make me feel comfortable.

For example, just last week, I asked a French speaking couple I know to help me pronounce “de rien”. When I say it, I sound like I dun just gots off the potato patch. They quite literally tag teamed me, one started working on drills to help me roll the ‘r’. Another started making a list of other similar words (so that I could sound stupid across a wider range of vocabulary).

It was quite amazing. But, with the exact same people, if I just speak French without prefacing it with a request for help, they switch to English instantly.

> help me pronounce “derrien”

Do you mean "de rien"? (As in "no problem", literally "it was nothing")

I agree r's are definitely the hardest thing to pronounce in french (as an english speaker at least). I think "rire" is the hardest word in the french language

Singing along to French songs in the car finally fixed my R problem, in a matter of days. Found I could do the rolled Spanish R and even the lazy, liquid Latin R with very little practice after getting that one down, too, and I couldn't at all before.

Thanks for pointing that out - I fixed it.

Don’t even get me started on rire. That’s another word that makes me sound significantly dumber than I hope I am!! :)

Once I received the feedback “you are killing the French language”, so we switched to English. But at no point did I tell this speaker that he was “killing the English language”.

If you do this while making it clear via subtext that you've messed up the difference between liver pâté and foie gras, you might as well get a cab right to the airport before you're deported.

I think you just need to find better French people to practice with.

My experience in France is people in many places are very happy for you to attempt to converse in French. Outside of the main tourist areas, many people only speak French so you have to at least try. Of course in Paris, this is often not true.

Because English is such a widely spoken language by people coming from very diverse first languages, I think English speakers are accustomed to not just bad English, but diversity of English.

I think this is not true, it's just an often told cliché. French is spoken in so many countries around the world and yet still French have this thing with foreigners trying to speak it. I think it's just more cultural and educational, nothing else.

They are sensitive because even what may seem to you like a tiny mistake, or a slight mispronunciation can completely change the meaning of a sentence or make it impossible to understand.

Broken English is everywhere, people got used to it. This is not the case for other, less pervasive languages.

True enough, but I remember being accused of deliberate misunderstanding by friends when they emphasised wrong syllable in English. Some minutes later with me racking my brain I might come up with the answer. But the mispronunciation had sent me off on the wrong track totally.

The fact that I speak other languages helps in that I am better prepared for likely sorts of mistakes, but even so.

If you try to speak Russian, no matter how broken, you will be encouraged and praised by every Russian person out there, no exceptions. The same is with Spanish. With French, it doesn't work this way, for some reason.